Phone or Camera?
The Sony Ericsson K700i comes with a whole slew of features that you could never have imagined would be built into such a small frame. It continues in the new Sony Ericsson concept of having the phone in front, while the back looks exactly like a small digital camera with only the lens and the flash apparent.

This tri-band phone was first announced on the 9th of March, 2004. Its best feature would probably be the camera button. With this button, only a touch is required to bring up the camera and video function. The camera button is strategically located in the same place a normal shutter button would be on a camera. The quality of images shot is good, as is shown by the screenshots of the KLCC shown on this page. Video shot are in the 3gpp format which Windows does not automatically recognise.

Sleek, metallic lines
You must admit that one thing Sony Ericsson does do very well is to build phones that exude an aura of durability. The K700 is no different. Although it feels slightly short and stocky, the phone as a whole feels balanced, and the large text on the keys mean that you do not have to squint to see what is printed on them.

The screen is done up in a brilliant 65K colours and it supports animations on the standby screen. The time and date is at the bottom of the screen, just above the descriptions for the softkeys. This will take some getting used to, as most of the other brands have their clock at the top of the screen. The infrared window is located at the top of the phone, just next to the power on button.

The inclusion of the radio feature is a nice touch. Just like with a Nokia, you will have to plug in the headset which acts as the antenna for the phone. However, Sony Ericsson is also big on Bluetooth headsets, so you might just find yourself carrying around two headsets to accommodate the requirement for the radio. Please note that the Bluetooth headset is not provided with the phone and must be purchased separately.

However, some improvements are required with the slot for the SIM card. It was rather difficult to remove a SIM card from the phone, and the method of removing the SIM card suggests that doing it too many times might damage your SIM card.

Icons and more icons
There are a lot of icons in this Sony Ericsson phone. The main menu has 12 of them, laid out in four rows of three icons each. According to the manual provided with the phone, there are 46 different icons listed and if there are that many icons in the phone, one wonders how one would keep track off all those small pictures.

The menu is easily understandable, and would be so fun to use if only the joystick was a little more firm. As it is, the loose joystick frequently caused me to select a different function or command other than what I had intended to do.

Having said all that, the K700 is a really powerful phone with 41 Megabytes of memory inside. The radio is able to store up to 20 programmed frequencies. However, blasting the radio at its highest setting produced a significant reduction in the battery power.

I transferred one MPEG file and one MP3 file to the phone with Bluetooth. The Bluetooth was easy to set up, and pairing was easy to achieve. The MPEG file would not read automatically, just as the specifications said, but the phone prompted me if I wished to listen to the MP3 file, and played the file back immediately with very little ado about saving the file in the right part of the phone’s memory.

Editor,s Opinion

The K700 is quite a fantastic phone considering what it is able to do versus its size. The softkeys are well placed, with the camera one on the left of the screen, exactly as it would be in a normal camera. The Internet shortcut key is on the right side of the phone and would be really useful considering that GPRS access is now available on a majority of Malaysian telco plans, both prepaid and postpaid.

Having both infrared and Bluetooth in a phone is important, and the K700i even has a cable if you want to link to a computer that way. The loudspeaker is excellent, both in volume and quality. I just had to turn down the volume slightly as I type this. The phone is rather slow in certain areas of use, especially with the images captured by the camera. You might notice that it takes a little while to save the shots from the camera.

However, the toggle buttons on the side of the phone did not work to scroll up and down in the menus as occurred in previous editions of Sony Ericsson phones. Although 41MB is a huge amount of storage space for a phone at this particular point in time, the lack of any expansion slots limits the K700 to only that 41MB of space. With the quality of the music playback from the phone, I guess that you will run out of space in the first week itself from loading one too many MP3 clips into the phone.

Except for the unreliable joystick, this is an excellent phone for most matters. I am told that the current price in the shops is about RM 1,400. If that is the case, than it would certainly be one of the best phones in the market right now in the RM 1,500 price bracket.